Well it is about time I wrote a post on this blog about Search Engine Optimisation. I though I would start with some of the changes that are happening in the search engine world.
People often make one search after another and until now search engines have treated these as unique individual searches however this is starting to change. A great example is if you search for Spain you get the following:
Nothing too exciting there it looks just like the results we have been getting for the past five years or so. Now comes the fun part. I follow this up with a search for flights and get the following results:
You can see in the results that have been returned by Google that the a significant number of flights are to Spain or Spanish cities. Not only in the sponsored adwords were this was first appeared but in the main results as well. Interesting times for SEOs.
What does this mean? Well it is effectively an encouragement for us all to start optimising for longer tail searches especially as the second search really became "Spain Flights"
The second area is a little more conjecture. Semantic search has been talked about for many years now but with Yahoo's announcement a couple of months back that it is running trials it is time to start considering what impact this may have on the world of SEO. Semantic search looks at the meaning of the words that the user is searching for and aims to return appropriate results e.g. TV, Television, Used car, second hand car. The similarities are close enough that they should really lead to the same sorts of pages but at the moment they don't. Why? Because seos have optimised different sets of pages for these terms. This area of search is one to watch because it is sure to mean big changes in the world of seo when the algorithms start to factor in the meaning of searches not just keyword matching.
